LOST AND PROFOUND

With the release of The Lost Tapes, a trove of unearthed recordings issued on Mute, Irmin Schmidt, one of the founders of Can, talks to Paul Lester about the Krautrock pioneers’ uniquely influential and fascinating career. Plus Can-ologist Jono Podmore reveals the details behind the new collection

LOST AND PROFOUND

Can are, after Kraftwerk, Germany’s most influential group. Listening to their 12 albums, from 1969’s Monster Movie to 1989’s Rite Time, you can hear careers forming – step forward, PiL, Talking Heads, Joy Division, Stone Roses, Happy Mondays, A Certain Ratio, Sonic Youth, Primal Scream, The Fall, Radiohead and more – even whole genres, from postpunk to indie-funk, drone-rock to sampladelia.

Part art-pop group, part anarchist collective, they are, in a way, rock’s centre of gravity, the nexus point for psychedelia, krautrock, cosmic/kosmiche space music, freak-folk, electronica, post-rock, shoegaze and more.

Now their catalogue has been added to massively with the release of The Lost Tapes, which were discovered at Can’s Inner Space studio. Keyboard player and founder member Irmin Schmidt, together with producer-musician collaborator (and his son-in-law) Jono Podmore, sifted through the 50 hours’ worth of material – “a travesty of archival organisation”, as Schmidt puts it – and over the course of four years, painstakingly reconstructed three CDs’ worth of music that represent something akin to krautrock’s Basement Tapes.

The tapes include isolated fragments from throughout Can’s history, including many featuring original vocalist Malcolm Mooney, who only …

by Paul Lester
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